Top 50 Google Cloud Interview Question and Answers

Google Cloud has become one of the leading platforms for cloud computing, offering a wide range of services that are essential for businesses transitioning to the cloud. As more companies adopt Google Cloud for their infrastructure, the demand for skilled professionals in this domain is on the rise. To help you prepare for your next Google Cloud interview, we’ve compiled a list of the top 50 Google Cloud interview questions and answers.
1. What is Google Cloud?
Answer: Google Cloud is a suite of cloud computing services offered by Google. It provides computing power, storage, and application development tools for businesses, helping them build, test, and deploy applications. Key services include Google Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Google Cloud Storage, and Google BigQuery.
2. What is the difference between Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Google Cloud Storage (GCS)?
Answer: GCP is the overarching platform that provides a variety of cloud services, such as computing, storage, and networking, whereas GCS is a specific service within GCP that allows users to store and retrieve any amount of data at any time.
3. What is Google Compute Engine?
Answer: Google Compute Engine is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering from Google Cloud that allows users to launch virtual machines (VMs) on-demand, providing scalable compute resources for a wide range of workloads.
4. What is Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)?
Answer: GKE is a managed Kubernetes service that automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications using Kubernetes. It simplifies the process of setting up a Kubernetes cluster on Google Cloud.
5. What is Cloud Pub/Sub in Google Cloud?
Answer: Cloud Pub/Sub is a messaging service that allows real-time messaging between applications. It is designed to provide reliable, many-to-many, asynchronous messaging for event-driven systems.
6. What is Google BigQuery?
Answer: BigQuery is a fully managed, serverless data warehouse service on Google Cloud. It enables super-fast SQL queries using the processing power of Google’s infrastructure, ideal for analyzing large datasets.
7. Explain Google Cloud’s IAM (Identity and Access Management).
Answer: IAM is a service that helps manage access to Google Cloud resources. It enables administrators to grant or restrict access to cloud resources based on roles, which can be assigned to users, groups, or service accounts.
8. What is a Google Cloud Region?
Answer: A Google Cloud Region is a specific geographic location where resources are hosted. Each region consists of multiple zones, which are isolated locations within the region that provide high availability and redundancy.
9. What is a Google Cloud Zone?
Answer: A Google Cloud Zone is an isolated location within a Google Cloud Region. Each zone contains one or more data centers, ensuring fault tolerance and high availability.
10. What is Google Cloud Storage (GCS)?
Answer: Google Cloud Storage is an object storage service that allows users to store and access large amounts of data at any time. It is ideal for storing files, backups, and media content.
11. What is Cloud Functions in Google Cloud?
Answer: Cloud Functions is a serverless compute service that allows you to run code in response to events, without provisioning or managing servers. It’s ideal for lightweight, event-driven applications.
12. What is the purpose of Google Cloud’s VPC (Virtual Private Cloud)?
Answer: VPC allows users to create isolated virtual networks within Google Cloud, enabling secure communication between instances and services while controlling traffic flow using firewalls and routing.
13. What is the difference between Google Cloud’s Persistent Disk and Local SSD?
Answer: Persistent Disks are network-attached storage devices that can be used as VM disks in Google Cloud, whereas Local SSDs are physically attached to the host machine and provide high performance with lower latency but no data redundancy.
14. What is Google Cloud Load Balancing?
Answer: Google Cloud Load Balancing distributes incoming traffic across multiple instances or resources to ensure optimal performance, availability, and scalability for web applications.
15. What are Cloud Endpoints in Google Cloud?
Answer: Cloud Endpoints is a service that allows you to create, manage, and secure APIs on Google Cloud, enabling you to connect applications and services in a seamless and reliable way.
16. What is the difference between Google Cloud SQL and Cloud Spanner?
Answer: Cloud SQL is a fully-managed relational database service for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server, while Cloud Spanner is a globally distributed, horizontally scalable database service that combines the best features of relational and NoSQL databases.
17. What is the use of Cloud CDN (Content Delivery Network)?
Answer: Cloud CDN is a globally distributed caching system that helps speed up the delivery of web content by caching static and dynamic content closer to end users, reducing latency and improving user experience.
18. Explain the concept of Google Cloud’s “Serverless” architecture.
Answer: Serverless computing is an approach where developers only focus on writing code while the underlying infrastructure is managed automatically. Google Cloud offers serverless services like Cloud Functions and App Engine.
19. What is Google Cloud Dataflow?
Answer: Google Cloud Dataflow is a fully managed service for processing real-time and batch data. It enables users to process data at scale using Apache Beam, with automatic scaling and optimization.
20. What is Google Cloud Dataproc?
Answer: Google Cloud Dataproc is a managed Spark and Hadoop service that allows users to run large-scale data processing workloads on Google Cloud, making it easy to spin up and manage clusters for analytics.
21. What is Google Cloud Datastore?
Answer: Cloud Datastore is a NoSQL database service designed for scalable applications. It is fully managed and ideal for applications that require high availability and scalability without the complexity of managing infrastructure.
22. What is Google Cloud Identity?
Answer: Google Cloud Identity is a service that provides identity and access management for Google Cloud. It allows organizations to manage users, groups, and security policies for both Google Cloud and external services.
23. Explain Google Cloud’s Bigtable service.
Answer: Bigtable is a NoSQL, distributed database designed for massive scalability. It is ideal for applications that need high throughput and low latency, such as IoT data, time-series data, and real-time analytics.
24. What is Google Cloud’s AI Platform?
Answer: AI Platform is a suite of machine learning services offered by Google Cloud. It provides tools for training, deploying, and managing machine learning models at scale, with support for TensorFlow, Scikit-learn, and more.
25. What is the role of Google Cloud’s Cloud Run?
Answer: Cloud Run is a fully managed service for deploying and running containerized applications in a serverless environment, automatically scaling based on incoming traffic without managing infrastructure.
26. What is the Google Cloud Console?
Answer: The Google Cloud Console is a web-based interface for managing Google Cloud resources. It provides a user-friendly interface to view, configure, and monitor your cloud resources.
27. Explain Google Cloud’s Stackdriver service.
Answer: Stackdriver is a monitoring, logging, and diagnostics tool for Google Cloud and AWS. It enables users to monitor the health of their applications and infrastructure, set up alerts, and troubleshoot issues.
28. What is Cloud Interconnect in Google Cloud?
Answer: Cloud Interconnect allows private, high-throughput, and low-latency connections between Google Cloud and on-premises networks. It provides a dedicated link for transferring large amounts of data securely.
29. What are the key benefits of using Google Cloud for Machine Learning (ML)?
Answer: Google Cloud offers a comprehensive set of ML tools, including pre-built models and services, scalable infrastructure, advanced analytics, and integration with TensorFlow, making it easier to build and deploy machine learning models.
30. What is Google Cloud AutoML?
Answer: AutoML is a suite of machine learning tools that enables users with limited ML expertise to train high-quality custom models for tasks like image classification, natural language processing, and translation.
31. What is Google Cloud Deployment Manager?
Answer: Google Cloud Deployment Manager is an infrastructure-as-code service that allows you to define and deploy Google Cloud resources using configuration files written in YAML or JSON. It enables you to automate and manage the provisioning of resources in a repeatable and consistent manner.
32. What is Cloud Router in Google Cloud?
Answer: Cloud Router is a fully managed Google Cloud service that enables dynamic routing between a Google Cloud VPC network and on-premises networks. It uses Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to exchange routes and ensure automatic updates to the routing tables.
33. What is Google Cloud’s Cloud Spanner?
Answer: Cloud Spanner is a fully managed, scalable, relational database service designed for applications that require global distribution and high availability. It combines the benefits of relational databases and NoSQL with horizontal scalability and strong consistency.
34. What is the Google Cloud Shell?
Answer: Google Cloud Shell is a browser-based shell that provides an environment for managing Google Cloud resources. It includes the Google Cloud SDK, a code editor, and 5GB of persistent storage, enabling users to interact with their cloud resources from anywhere.
35. What is Google Cloud’s Apigee API Platform?
Answer: Apigee is a full lifecycle API management platform that allows you to design, secure, deploy, and monitor APIs. It helps businesses expose their APIs to developers and partners while ensuring security, scalability, and analytics.
36. What are Google Cloud Storage classes?
Answer: Google Cloud Storage offers different storage classes to optimize for cost and performance. These include:
- Standard: For frequently accessed data.
- Nearline: For infrequently accessed data (at least once a month).
- Coldline: For long-term storage of data that is rarely accessed.
- Archive: For data that is rarely accessed and meant for long-term storage.
37. What is the difference between Google Cloud’s BigQuery and Cloud Datastore?
Answer: BigQuery is a fully managed, serverless data warehouse for large-scale analytics, whereas Cloud Datastore is a NoSQL database service used for storing application data that requires high availability and scalability. BigQuery is ideal for data analysis, while Datastore is used for app data storage.
38. What is Google Cloud’s VPC Peering?
Answer: VPC Peering allows two Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) networks to communicate with each other using private IP addresses. It enables secure, low-latency communication between VPCs, whether within the same project or across different projects in Google Cloud.
39. What is the role of Google Cloud’s Data Loss Prevention (DLP) API?
Answer: The DLP API is a service provided by Google Cloud to help you discover, classify, and protect sensitive data within your datasets. It helps identify personally identifiable information (PII) and other sensitive information, allowing businesses to comply with privacy regulations.
40. What is Google Cloud’s Firestore?
Answer: Firestore is a NoSQL document database service offered by Google Cloud. It allows developers to store, sync, and query app data at scale. Firestore is designed for mobile and web applications with real-time data synchronization.
41. What are Cloud Functions in Google Cloud and when would you use them?
Answer: Cloud Functions is a serverless computing service that allows you to run your code in response to events like HTTP requests, changes in storage, or Pub/Sub messages. It’s ideal for lightweight, event-driven applications that need to run without managing servers.
42. What is Google Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP)?
Answer: Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP) enables secure access to your Google Cloud resources by using identity and context-based policies. It helps you control who can access your applications and services by verifying users’ identities and ensuring they meet security requirements.
43. What is the difference between Google Cloud SQL and Cloud Spanner?
Answer: Cloud SQL is a fully managed relational database service supporting MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server, ideal for small to medium workloads. Cloud Spanner, on the other hand, is designed for mission-critical applications that need global distribution, high scalability, and strong consistency.
44. What is Google Cloud Marketplace?
Answer: Google Cloud Marketplace is an online store that offers ready-to-deploy third-party applications, services, and solutions on Google Cloud. It enables users to quickly find, purchase, and deploy applications that integrate with Google Cloud services.
45. What is Cloud Composer in Google Cloud?
Answer: Cloud Composer is a fully managed workflow orchestration service built on Apache Airflow. It allows users to define, schedule, and monitor workflows and automate tasks across Google Cloud and external services.
46. What is Google Cloud’s Cloud Memorystore?
Answer: Cloud Memorystore is a fully managed in-memory data store service for Redis and Memcached. It enables fast, scalable caching to improve application performance by reducing the time spent on data retrieval.
47. What are the types of Google Cloud Compute Engine instances?
Answer: Google Cloud offers various types of Compute Engine instances based on specific use cases, including:
- General-purpose instances (e.g., N1, E2 series)
- Memory-optimized instances (e.g., M series)
- Compute-optimized instances (e.g., C2 series)
- GPU instances (e.g., A2 series)
- Preemptible instances for cost savings.
48. What is Google Cloud’s Operations Suite (formerly Stackdriver)?
Answer: The Google Cloud Operations Suite provides monitoring, logging, and application performance management tools for managing Google Cloud resources. It enables you to monitor system health, collect logs, and troubleshoot performance issues.
49. What are Google Cloud’s Cloud Filestore and its use cases?
Answer: Cloud Filestore is a fully managed file storage service for applications that require a file system interface. It is ideal for workloads that need shared file storage like content management systems, home directories, and software development environments.
50. What is Google Cloud’s Anthos?
Answer: Anthos is a hybrid and multi-cloud platform that allows you to build and manage applications across on-premises and multiple cloud environments. It includes Kubernetes, Istio, and other tools to help organizations modernize their infrastructure and applications while maintaining consistency and control across clouds.